<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
	<title>phpns : help</title>
	<style type="text/css" media="all">
		h3 {
			background: #eee;
			padding: 20px;
			margin: 20px -8px;
		}
	</style>
</head>
<body>
	<h1>phpns help</h1>
	<h2>documentation</h2>
	<p>The phpns documentation aims to help you accomplish certain tasks
	with the phpns software. Click a task below for additional information.</p>
	
	<h4>topics</h4>
	<ul>
		<li><a href="#index">index</a></li>
		<li><a href="#new article">new article</a></li>
		<li><a href="#article management">article management</a></li>
		<li><a href="#user management">user management</a></li>
		<li><a href="#preferences">preferences</a></li>
		<li><a href="#about">about</a></li>
	</ul>
	<h3 id="success">success help</h3>
	
	<h3 id="error">error help</h3>
		
	<h3 id="including your news">including your news</h3>
	<p>phpns and it's features are worthless if you can't display your work to the world. You 
	can "include" your news on any php document throughout the server, in all different forms. 
	Phpns includes an integration wizard in the preferences section, however, if you wish to do 
	it by hand, we'll help you here.</p>
	<p>The easiest and quickest way to display your news on your website is to follow these steps:</p>
	<ol>
		<li>Open up the PHP document you wish to have the news 'display' in.</li>
		<li>Paste the following code:
			<code>
			php
			include();
			
			</code>
			You will need to modify the code above to reflect the actual path of the shownews.php file.
		</li>
		<li>Save and exit the document</li>
		<li>Upload it to your server (if necessary)</li>
	</ol>
	<p>This method will give you the default settings, specified in the preferences of the administration panel. If this is fine for you, then you're done. However, if you want additional customization, continue reading.</p>
	
	<h3 id="index">index help</h3>
	<p>The phpns index is the main page which you are directed to after logging in. 
	At the top of the page, you'll find multiple links to post a new item, manage 
	current items, manage the phpns users, modify your preferences, and read the 
	phpns about page.</p>
	<p>Displayed below the page description, you'll find an information section, which 
	contains two different sections: statistics, and recent articles. Both are pretty 
	straight forward. You will notice the help hyperlink at the bottom right area of 
	the page, which can be clicked to view certain help topics (the guide you are viewing 
	now!).</p>
	
	<h3 id="new article">new article help</h3>
	<p>posting a new item is fairly straightforward with phpns. Click the 'new article' 
	link in the admin navigation. Once you are at the page, you should see a short 
	description, along with an HTML form. A list of the fields are below:</p>
	<ul>
		<li>article title | <span style="color: red">required</span></li>
		<li>article sub-title | <span style="color: green">optional</span></li>
		<li>article category | <span style="color: red">required</span></li>
		<li>main article | <span style="color: red">required</span></li>
		<li>full story | <span style="color: green">optional</span></li>
		<li>article image | <span style="color: green">optional</span></li>
		<li>start date | <span style="color: green">optional</span></li>
		<li>end date | <span style="color: green">optional</span></li>
		<li>disable comments | <span style="color: green">optional</span></li>
		<li>save as draft | <span style="color: green">optional</span></li>
	</ul>
	
	<h5>article title</h5>
	<p>the title can contain any character, and has a limit of 100 characters. Example: My first post!</p>
	
	<h5>article sub-title</h5>
	<p>the sub-title can contain any character, and has a limit of 100 characters. Example: and why I love this cms...</p>
	
	<h5>article category</h5>
	<p>the article category is very important, and currently you can only have one (1) category per article. We plan to change this in a future release...</p>
	
	<h5>main article</h5>
	<p>the main article is the most important element in article items. Limit of 20,000 characters.</p>
	
	<h5>full story</h5>
	<p>the rest of the article. this is optional! Limit of 20,000 characters.</p>
	
	<h5>article image</h5>
	<p>100px by 100px image representing the article content. optional. Accepts jpg, png, gif, and bmp.</p>
	
	<h5>start date</h5>
	<p>A more obscure feature of phpns. You can specify when a date will become visable on your website. The 
	format must be in the following order: "MM/DD/YYYY". The date is converted to a Unix timestamp, and stored 
	in the database. Leave this field blank if you wish to start the article immediately.</p>
	
	<h5>end date</h5>
	<p>A more obscure feature of phpns. You can specify when a date will stop being visable on your website. The 
	format must be in the following order: "MM/DD/YYYY". The date is converted to a Unix timestamp, and stored 
	in the database. Leave this field blank if you wish to never end the article.</p>
	
	<h5>disable comments</h5>
	<p>Check this box if you wish to disallow comments for this specific article. THIS WILL ONLY affect this 
	article, it will not affect any other item.</p>
	
	<h5>save as draft</h5>
	<p>Check this box if you don't want the article to appear publicly. This is a useful feature if you are 
	working on a long post, or if you want other people to modify the article before it goes live.</p>
	
	
	<h3 id="article management">article management help</h3>
		<p>article management allows you to view the articles you have posted in different ways, orders, and with conditions. By default, articles are listed in a descending date order. That means, the latest article that has been created will be shown at the TOP of the news management table. Although this might suite you, sometimes you may require ordering in a different way, scroll down to sorting options.</p>
		
		<h4>Search</h4>
			<p>Searching is really easy with phpns. At the top of article management, you will see a hyperlink named 'search' (with an expand/collapse option). Expand the search section, and you're presented with 2 fields: your query, and category. Whatever text you enter in the query box (the box with the text 'click here to start your search'), is the text we'll search for in every active article to date. The system will scan the title, subtitle, main article, and full story for that query entered. You also have the option to narrow your search by category. By default, it will search in all categories.</p>
		
		
		<h4>Sorting options</h4>
			<p>The article list can be sorted in various ways, so you can walk through your database articles easily. You have the following sorting options, which you can activate by clicking at the top of each column of the table.</p>
		<h5>Sort by date</h5>
		<p>This will allow you to sort the articles based on the time they were posted. Descending is the default sorting order, however, you may also set this to ascending.</p>
		
		<h5>Sort by title name (alphabetically)</h5>
		<p>This will allow you to sort the articles based on the articles' title. Ascending will order it from 0-9,A-Z. Descending will reverse the order.</p>
		
		<h5>Sort by author</h5>
		<p>This will allow you to sort the articles based on the author of the article. Ascending will sort the articles based on the name of the author, in alphabetical order. Therefore, ascending would present: Alan, Billy, Caty, George, Veronica, Zack. Descending would reverse the order.</p>
		
		<h5>Sort by Active or Activity</h5>
		<p>This will allow you to sort the articles based on their status as active or unactive. This is very useful for weeding out articles that have been dormant for a long time.</p>
		
		<h4>Other uses</h4>
		<h5>View articles by a certain author</h5>
		<p>You can view all the articles posted by a specific user. While viewing articles, you can simply click on the username in the column "Author", and it will load up a selection of articles by that selected author.</p>
		
		<h5>View articles by category</h5>
		<p>You can do the same thing with the author, except clicking on the category next to any article. It will bring up a list of articles posted in that category.</p>
		
		
	<h3 id="user management">user management help</h3>
		<p>User management is a tool which lets you control and see various users on your installation, like creating new users, editing users, deleting users, and viewing different aspects of users.</p>
		<p>By default, the user management page will show a list of options, and a list of users with their information. The table which lists users has the following information:
		<ul>
			<li>username - what the user's username is</li>
			<li>full name - the full name of the user</li>
			<li>date - the date the user was created</li>
			<li>rank - the current rank of the user. You can click on the rank to edit the rank.</li>
			<li>#/articles - displays the current number of articles created by the user. You can click this do display the users.</li>
		</ul>
		<h5>new user</h5>
		
	<h3 id="preferences">preferences help</h3>
	
	<h3 id="about">about help</h3>
	
</body>
</html>
